Word Watch New Books For The Linguists On Your List

These new books about language will delight your professorial posse, even Rudolph, the well-read, knows-all brain, dear.

Speaking of brains, Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, argues for a common-sense approach to grammar and usage in "The Sense of Style — The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century" (Viking, $27.95). His acceptance of usages such as "very unique" and "between you and I" will ruffle the feathers of linguistic purists.

But his eloquent celebration of literary clarity, originality and concision will lift the wings of every writer. Begin a paragraph, he advises, not with cliché ("Since the dawn of time . . .), but with clout: "We are all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones."

Perhaps you've heard the notion that people using different languages experience the world differently; for example, that people who use the same word for "green" and "blue" actually see those colors as identical.

This linguistic theory, formulated by Benjamin Lee Whorf during the 1930s, is deftly debunked by linguist John McWhorter in "The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language" (Oxford, $19.95). It's Whorf vs. McWhorter — Star Wors! — in this mano-a-manifesto, as McWhorter labels Whorf's ideas "utterly incoherent, and even dangerous."

And for that plucky friend who's trying to master a new language, pick up "Fluent Forever — How To Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" by Gabriel Wyner (Harmony Books, $16).

Wyner opens a toolbox full of nifty techniques: visual mnemonics and stories (picture Bruce Lee eating a hot dog); linguistic apps for your cellphone; exercises for your tongue; designs for your flashcards. And don't forget playing the party game Taboo in your target language.

And for those Americans who want to comprehend the "foreign" language used by the Brits, there's Christopher Moore's "How To Speak Brit — The Quintessential Guide to the King's English, Cockney Slang and Flummoxing British Phrases" (Gotham Books, $20).

You'll learn that "wags" are the wives and girlfriends of millionaire soccer players, "dog and bone" is Cockney rhyming slang for "telephone," "naff" means "uncool, lacking in style," and the "gob" in "gobsmacked" (left speechless) comes from the Celtic slang for "mouth."